From effective teacher to uberized teacher

the contractual precariousness of brazilian teachers

Abstract

A new economic order emerges in the structural crisis of capital, neoliberalism, which resumes market regulation, imposing a profound restructuring of production from the 1970s onwards, bringing significant changes to the world of work. New work modalities emerged in the early 21^st century from this setting with the drive of Informational and Communication Technologies (ICT). As an illustration of this current capitalist facet, we highlight Uber, which brought a neologism (“work uberization”) due to its representative specificity. In the same vein, over the last few decades, teaching education and work have been swept away by the neoliberal ideology expressed by the World Bank’s influence on education and the quantitative growth of non-permanent teachers in Primary Education in the Brazilian public school system. This paper aims to reflect on the trend towards the work uberization of Brazilian teachers. We adopted bibliographical, documental, and legal research as a theoretical-methodological procedure anchored in a critical perspective to achieve the proposed objectives. We identified, comparatively, the growth of temporary and substitute work contracts of public-school teachers and the uberized nature of teaching work, showing the similarities and differences mediated by precariousness evidenced by the contractual weakness of these modalities. We concluded that the guidelines imposed by the productive restructuring promoted by the capital crisis gained new contours with the intensive use of technology, creating a setting of flexibilization, instability, precariousness, and impoverishment for the working class.